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Show HN: VoiceClonr attempts to reconstruct human voices

by voiceclonr on 7/1/15, 3:53 PM with 34 comments

  • by elmalaak on 7/1/15, 6:16 PM

    Certainly it's still far from being able to deceive a human into thinking synthesized speech of any speaker saying anything is real, but it has definitely and clearly capture a certain quality to each of those voices. Really cool project and I'm sure it portends even more awesome work in the area.

  • by cristianpascu on 7/1/15, 5:51 PM

    I am wondering, what exacly is holding back the technology? Why isn't it there yet?

  • by chillingeffect on 7/1/15, 7:38 PM

    I love that you're shooting for a holy grail!

    Aiming for lyrics is a much higher target than everyday text though, due to grammatical hints and the extra pitch and phrasing demands of lyrics. Your results might hit people harder on non-lyrical textual bodies.

    Keep up the good work, I'd like to make something like this for musical instrument someday :)

    P.s. have you ever heard of Douglas Hofstadters Letter Spirit project which synthesizes fonts from a subset? http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/mcgrawg/fonts.gif

  • by slantyyz on 7/1/15, 6:19 PM

    This is very cool.

    Reminds me of this -- before Roger Ebert died, he tried to have his voice reconstructed by some company using audio from his TV show, etc., but alas, it was too difficult at the time, so he ended up using one of the Apple TTS voices instead.

  • by Zikes on 7/1/15, 7:51 PM

    I would pay a fair amount for a TTS engine that can accurately mimic GLaDOS's voice.

  • by ocdtrekkie on 7/1/15, 9:05 PM

    I'm super excited about this.

    One of my biggest peeves right now is that voices cost a ton of money, few are readily available otherwise, and a lot of the new stuff is cloud-dependent. (Which is a big turn-off to me.)

    What are you looking to do with this?

  • by secfirstmd on 7/1/15, 7:39 PM

    There have been rumours of government capability to do this for some time. For example, to use false voice messages for Radar instructions to enemy fighters etc. Interesting to see it in the commercial space.

  • by scottydelta on 7/1/15, 5:59 PM

    And I was hoping to find Morgan Freeman's voice there already.

  • by ocdtrekkie on 7/1/15, 9:07 PM

    Request: Star Trek computer voice (Majel Barrett Roddenberry)

    There's hundreds of episodes containing it, including remastered audio in the HD versions of TNG.

  • by fasouto on 7/1/15, 6:45 PM

    Very nice project, congratulations!

    One suggestion: make the text-to-speech button bigger and centered (I missed it the first time).

  • by acd on 7/1/15, 9:13 PM

    Could a deep neural network clone the voice of a person given previous sound recordings of that person speaking?

  • by SchizoDuckie on 7/1/15, 5:50 PM

    They all just sound robotic to me.

    Why even attempt to get things like imitating specific people's voices to work when your speech isn't even fluid and pronounced clearly to begin with?